Good listening is the heart of effective leadership because it enables the leader to discover what their teams are thinking and feeling. It encourages team members to contribute and feel valued. And it underpins shared commitments and actions, leading to greater ownership, productivity and ultimately higher performance.
But the pace and complexity of work make listening well a challenge, particularly across cultures, time-zones and telephone lines. Working on listening will enable you to:
- benchmark your listening,
- develop strategies for listening well,
- practise the necessary skills and mindset, and
- plan how to develop them further
The approach draws directly on the insights captured in my book, ‘The art of listening in coaching and mentoring’ [link] and benefits from the diverse expertise of my colleagues Sarah Brammeier and David Trevaskis. [Find out more about the team]
We believe that listening well is simple but far from easy. It is a natural but often under-used and under-developed skill. We, therefore, focus on learning through doing. We find that people apply what they have learnt if they have tried and felt it, not just understood it.
Good listening is active and so is our approach. The team has extensive experience in acting, coaching, directing, facilitating, and improvised comedy and that informs how we work. That means that working with us is different: it’s fun and deep, reflective and active, systematic and individual, experiential and always practical.
If you would like to talk about developing your listening as a leader or about how we might work with your team or group, get in touch
